Razão instrumental e consumo na internet - um estudo sobre a publicidade na web 2.0

Abstract

The outbreak of Web 2.0 delimited a radical transformation in the use of the web, as it enabled the users’ passage from mere consumers of content to also producers, as well as granted them greater control over the contents they accessed. That was followed by the birth of several free content platforms, which quickly gained acceptance by users all over the world. Those platforms (such as social networks, video sharing websites and blogs) soon started to be sought by advertisers as an answer to the declining trend in which their traditional promotion techniques found themselves due to their unwantedness by users. However, in their purpose to get internet users’ attention without their ads being spotted as such, advertisers started to seek nonintrusive marketing techniques, such as invisible marketing, guerrilla marketing and native advertising. Advertising then starts to invade and blend itself with the very content displayed in those platforms, by means of commercial contracts with the authors of that content, which is not always disclosed to their audience. This study aimed to investigate the transformation of one kind of those platforms – namely, blogs – from “free” into commercial platforms. More specifically, it consisted in a qualitative research, both theoretical and empirical, whose theoretical framework of reference was the School of Frankfurt, and sought to investigate manifestations of the instrumental rationality in sponsored blogs. Using documentary research as technique and building on the contribution of authors such as Adorno, Horkheimer and Marcuse, this research studied the presentness of some concepts such as instrumental rationality, culture industry and one-dimensional man, considering contemporary forms of domination, which increasingly present themselves as gratification, thus being imperceptible or even desired by individuals. Sponsored blogs, when deceiving their followers by omitting the commercial nature of some of their posts, reproduce this mystificatory process, which is opposed to the purpose of enlightenment, that is, of emancipation of men from any form of domination. This research verified that instrumental rationality manifested itself in several ways in sponsored blogs, since the “selling” of the audience to sponsors and the aesthetic reformulation of blogs and posts to the usage of subtle persuasion techniques to induce the visitors of blogs to consume wares which were chosen by the advertisers. This persuasion, however, takes place while keeping the impression of autonomy of choice by the users, who ignores the stratagem plotted to convince them, so that subjectivity is still used as an instrument by advertising to accomplish its goals.